Part history, part biography, and part mystery story, Smokeless Sugar reveals how the concept of a national economy took shape in China by investigating the 1936 execution of Feng Rui, a provincial official who introduced modern sugar milling in Guangdong.

Examining the circumstances of Feng Rui’s arrest on charges of corruption, Emily Hill traces the construction of a Chinese national economy through cross-border interactions between industry and agriculture and between China and Japan. She makes the case that Feng was, in fact, a scapegoat in a multi-sided power struggle in which political leaders vied with commercial players for access to China's markets and tax revenues. This illuminating study challenges conventional wisdom about the effectiveness of the Republican state in promoting national unity during the Nanjing decade and highlights continuities in official economic policies from the 1930s to the Communist era.